We would talk by headset and keep it on at all times. I felt a lone bead of sweat run from my right armpit down my side. The AKs pointed at us like eyes. Our pilot stayed in the plane. The high, annoying ululating never stopped. Then — as the sky darkened from thick clouds — further blinding any satellites above — most of the Technicals formed into a convoy, some behind us, some in front.
“Reassuring escort,” Eddie said.
I took the wheel, and despite its dilapidated appearance, the Land Rover roared to life. Our plane receded in the rearview mirror. The muzzle of the .50 caliber gun in front of us bounced each time the vehicle hit a rut, and there seemed to be more ruts than flat areas.
“At least that howling stopped,” said Eddie, removing fingers from his ears.
I downshifted and we followed the convoy along a dirt/sand yard — wide footpath through tall grass, with the .50 caliber barrel pointing at us the whole time. A few fat raindrops fell. The air smelled of alkali salt. Only our left wiper blade worked. I passed a lone conical hut and drove through a pathetically small vegetable garden, crushing some farmer’s yams, and across a trickle stream and past a fat-trunked baobab tree against which a large baboon reclined, watching us, hands linked behind his head like he was Tom Sawyer on a Mississippi River summer day.
We crossed through an old abandoned banana plantation. Now the rows of plants were half blasted by artillery, and shredded blue plastic sheeting hung like shrouds over long-rotted fruit. I saw a human skeleton rib cage lying in a furrow.
Ten minutes later, Eddie sniffed and turned to me, frowning. The wind came from ahead, a rise.
“You smell it?”
“Yes.”
Rot again, but different. It wasn’t just vegetables now. I’d smelled this on battlefields.
The Technical in front of us hit a rut so deep that the chassis bounced, and Eddie and I winced, watching the gunner’s hands squeeze the dual handles.
Then we topped the rise and a hundred scrubby yards ahead saw the deserted-looking research camp… about one acre in diameter, a collection of sun-bleached, rain-washed canvas tents.
“I don’t like this. Where’s the people, One?”
The camp lay inside a man-made barrier of rolled thorn bushes, nature’s concertina wire, to keep lions and hyenas out. Rectangular two-person tents ringed the inside perimeter, flaps closed. A larger dining or research tent centered the lot, with an area outside for cooking, long picnic-style tables and benches, and a stovepipe sticking above the tent, not emitting smoke. Lionel had told me that researchers here studied sediments, ground layers. Lionel had said that due to warfare in Somalia, important work on African climate, evolution, and ocean current patterns had stopped for the past twenty years. Lionel had said that his expedition opened a new era of cooperation, albeit one that had been bought by hefty bribe payments. Looking at the silent mass of tents, I knew that everything Lionel had told me was wrong.
As we drew closer, our escorts broke away to join a half dozen other vehicles surrounding the camp.
They would go no farther. Only we doctors could do that.
“Where is everyone, One?”
“Inside the tents, I guess. Sick.”
Eddie nudged me and pointed. The first body — a woman from the size and long hair — lay half sprawled on the picnic table. A second — a fat man — lay draped over the thorn barrier, as he’d been crazy enough to try to climb over it instead of walking out. Maybe he’d tried to escape at night, to get away from the militia.
Eddie pointed at a tall tree. The branches were moving. They were covered with vultures, I saw, scrawny, gizzard-necked scavengers. All seemed focused on the bodies below.
“Blow the horn, One. Get them out of here.”
I did. The birds did not leave.
Eddie said, “Shit. You think they’re all dead?”
I reached back for my biosuit. The stillness seemed exaggerated. But then a couple of flaps moved on the sleeping tents. Slowly, figures began to emerge into the day. It was hard to believe what I was seeing.
Eddie whispered, horrified, “Jesus Christ, Uno. Lionel said that all of this happened in under two weeks?”
THREE
I was so stunned by the spectacle in front of us that at first I missed the clues behind. The heat, the palm trees, the camel caravan in the distance, the white beach a quarter mile off, and the blue ocean all added to the sense of disembodiment. I was cast back in time. I was witnessing something I’d not seen since boyhood Sunday school. Only too late would I remember the metallic clicking and growl of engines, the arguing militia behind.
“My God, what the hell… it looks like leprosy,” I said to Eddie over the neck mike, stunned at the number of sick people we faced. At first glance, it looked like at least three quarters of the population of this research camp.
“In two weeks? In a group? Never! Gotta be some kind of chemical blistering agent, you ask me. Or something in the sediment they pulled up, some toxin out of the ground.”
“We were sent here to look for something new.”
“We need to call in the cavalry,” Eddie said, meaning more people.
“You heard Hassan. Won’t happen.” We started forward.
Ahead, more canvas tent flaps had opened, and one by one, men and women were still emerging into the gray light, in a sight I associated with Sundays back in Massachusetts, with Pastor Brad in the Smith Falls Protestant Church droning on about Jesus while I cringed at drawings in Bible Images for Kids.
Some of the ill leaned on makeshift crutches — a crooked tree limb, a tent pole swathed in a towel. Healthier people helped the worst ones, but the most extreme cases came by themselves, crawling, hands rising and falling like crash victims in a desert, more tropism than human.
But the juxtaposition of twenty-first-century clothing — Gap blue jeans, a T-shirt reading GREAT DANE… UNIVERSITY AT ALBANY, aviator sunglasses, and Day-Glo Reebok running shoes — none of it went with the associations in my head.
Our biosuits sounded like crumpling cellophane. Moon men, that was us. We sweated inside Nebraska Center’s mandated protection for Ebola workers. Baby blue plastic gowns and double glove layers; plastic hoods over our heads and necks; goggles and fluid-resistant leg and shoe coverings. But the suits were designed for an air-conditioned hospital, not a desert country where the mercury could top ninety degrees in the shade.
“At least we’re wearing only level twos,” Eddie said. Threes would have stuck us inside sealed hoods, breathing through pack filters, temperature rising inside the taped-up body suit and rubber gloves. We’d have only twenty minutes before we either needed water, or had to get the hood off before our sweat made us blind.
“Remember the Cameroons, Eddie?” Volcanic lakes in that country had suddenly erupted with poison gas bubbles a few years back, wiping out a village of three hundred people.
The lead man dragged himself through the thorn bush barrier opening, his face so swollen and red that it was hard to see his eyes. They seemed buried in folds of skin, with patches peeling away, showing gristle, meat, a fly in the wreckage, crawling. The eyes looked like a prizefighter’s after a tough bout.